PETER HITCHENS: One glorious day in Sevastopol 12 years ago, I saw what was coming. That's why I won't join this carnival of hypocrisy

Excerpt; read the whole thing:

I cannot join in it. I know too much. I know that our policy of Nato expansion – which we had promised not to do and which we knew infuriated Russians – played its part in bringing about this crisis.

I know that Ukraine's current government, now treated as if it was almost holy, was brought into being by a mob putsch openly backed by the USA in 2014.

I know that the much-admired President Zelensky in February 2021 closed down three opposition TV stations on the grounds of 'national security'. They went dark that night. I know that the opposition politician Viktor Medvedchuk was put under house arrest last year on a charge of treason. Isn't this the sort of thing Putin does?

I know that Ukraine's army has used severe force against Russian civilians in the Don Basin since 2014. The Russians have done dreadful things there, too, but there are plenty of people who will tell you that. The point is that this is not a contest of saints versus sinners, or of Mordor versus the Shire.

I also find it awkward that, when Britain and the USA rightly denounced Putin's illegal invasion of a sovereign country, they seemed to have forgotten that we gave him the idea, by doing this in Iraq in 2003. Unlike them I can truly claim to have opposed both these actions.

I tire of being told that Nato is purely defensive alliance when we know it bombed Serbia in 1999, incidentally killing civilians, when Serbia had not attacked a Nato member. 

I also don't recall Libya attacking a Nato member before that 'defensive' alliance launched the air war on Tripoli which also killed civilians, children included, and turned that country into a cauldron of chaos, benefiting nobody.

And then there's the other thing that sticks in my gullet. The countries of the West have egged Ukraine on into a confrontation with Russia which has predictably ended in Putin's barbaric invasion. 

How much of the death, destruction, and suffering is the fault of the American political crooks who got rich using this poor country as their personal piggy bank?